Zack Snyder's odious Sucker Punch opens with a dialogue-free tableau that introduces us, sort of, to the back story of our blank-faced heroine, Babydoll (Emily Browning) and her sister (Frederique De Raucort).
Their mother has just died, which means their stepfather (Gerard Plunkett) has free reign to get down to the important business of trying to rape both girls. Attempting to defend them both against his advances, Babydoll accidentally and inexplicably kills her little sister (who has presumably already been violated by dad) instead. She is promptly shipped off to Lennox House For The Mentally Insane, dressed in skin-coloured, rain-soaked PJs all the better for clinging to her every fun-sized curve.
All this is set to an interminable sing-song cover of Sweet Dreams, because, like, you know, she's actually in a living nightmare or some shit. It's not the first sledgehammer-subtle song choice; the soundtrack of covers and mash-ups signpost every narrative twist, every intended mood. Thus, when we hit Lennox's corridors, it's a drippy cover of - LOL! - The Pixies' Where Is My Mind. Because people in asylums ask that very question, geddit!
Lennox is the sort of asylum where inmates are handed a kicky mini-skirt and a few sticks of Rimmel kohl upon arrival; it's full of Very Bad Girls who wear the latest in mentally ill chic.
There she meets, in descending order of expendability, Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish, slumming it beyond all comprehension) and her sister Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and Amber (Jamie Chung).
Their allegedly Polish music therapist, Dr. Polski Ogorki Gorski (Carla Gugino, in generic Eastern European mode), gets them to do sexy dances that transport them into parallel dimensions, or something. Suddenly they are dancers in a low-lit kitten club, and the creepy orderly Blue (Oscar Isaac) is now their swanky pimp. I think.
I mean, I'm not really sure. I don't think Zack Snyder is, either; evidently the 'You will be unprepared' tagline was also the script editor's professional motto. Sucker Punch is an insulting afterthought of a film; the worst sort of "non-linear" narrative that makes gestures towards depth or subversiveness but is really just lazy. It's the screenwriting equivalent of those novelty clocks with the numbers jumbled that say 'Who Cares?'
Anyway, Babydoll lap-dances her way through the looking-glass into ancient Japan (or maybe China; all look same, right?), where she meets a Wise Man meditating all up in some candles. No, really, that's his name, Wise Man, and he's played by Scott Glenn as a Home Brand Carradine.
He kits her out with some weapons: a katana, and a handgun that dangles kawaii phone charms for no reason other than to further fuel the queasy mix of sexualisation and infantilisation that Snyder has marinated the doll-like Browning in.
(Glenn's character appears at the beginning of each action sequence, spouting a different motivational poster phrase each time, like "If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything", and, er, "Don't ever write a check with your mouth you can't cash with your ass". Pro tip, cheers Zen bro.)
Then a miracle happens: Skunk Anansie are magically beamed into the new century from the toilet circuit venue they were last spotted at in 1998, and they embellish Bjork's An Army Of Me while Babydoll F-B-F-LPs some big robot samurai.
Babydoll returns from Planet Gyrate to the magical brothel of dreams, and hatches a plan to escape, using the instructions of Mystical Kimono Dude - they must procure a map, a knife, fire, a key, and... something else. The final element, much like on Captain Planet, must be discovered by Babydoll through the course of their adventures.
And those adventures involve, variously, kablammo-ing a horde of steampunk Nazi zombie soldiers, committing dragon infanticide, and dismantling a bomb on a train heading toward the International Daft Punk Cosplayers Convention.
We don't really give a shit about any of our heroines, because neither does the film: they have no inner life, no story beyond "they are sex slaves in foxy pin-up outfits". They eventually begin to drop like flies, dispatched with increasingly distressing callousness.
Babydoll is the most sinister of all Snyder's creations, however - for the first half an hour or so of the film, she is mute (beyond a few Nell-like moans and yelps). When she does finally talk, she might as well have just stayed silent. She exists for no reason other than to... shit, son, I don't know.
She is Hello Kitty, voiceless and cute; set adrift on misogyny bliss.
In the end - and fuck spoiler alerts, this film doesn't deserve that level of respect for its narrative - it turns out it wasn't really even her story. We know that because, in the Sucker Punch universe, being a hero means inviting gang rape so someone else can slip out the gates.
Yes, Sucker Punch is surely the questionable zenith of the "rape as character motivation" trope that has infected film and comic books with increasing aggressiveness over the past decade or so. The air at Lennox is thick with the threat of rape, and most of the inmates have been abused before their incarceration; Blue uses sexual violence or its threat to control his charges.
(Carla Gugino should consider looking into an AVO against Snyder, given she has appeared in two of his films and had her characters sexually assaulted in both.)
Outside of the asylum/brothel, the violence is less expressly sexual, but it's still sexualised. As the girls fly through the air pulling Matrix moves, we're treated to plenty of slow-motion nude upskirt oops shots.
Snyder directs all these scenes with an onanistic boredom; every time the girls land one of those Crouching Stripper, Hidden Tampon leaps, they do so in the same half-kneeling-one-hand-outstretched-before-looking-up-at-the-camera-while-wind-whips-their-hair manner. Every time. Just in case we didn't get it the first ten times.
(While we're at it, can we call an international moratorium on the hopelessly stale "machine-gun shells falling, tinkling, to the ground in slow motion" shot? It is to 21st century action cinema as the "archers shoot arrows > arrows fly through air in graceful arc > arrows hit target" series of shots was to the late-20th century.)
Let's get one thing straight: there is nothing remotely empowering about Sucker Punch's depiction of women. The "characters" (a generous term) are ciphers; they drift through the "story" with only the barest hint of motivation.
The violence the female characters face ranges from cartoonish to shockingly brutal. There's no sense that Snyder has given any of it much deep thought, unlike say Paul Verhoeven, who at least had some cultural commentary packed into Showgirls' moments of sexual violence.
As the unpleasant rapped-over "remix" of Queen's I Want It All runs, through one hurr durr scene of orc-fighting action, "You got what I want, and I need it right now/Give it to me, baby, I don't care how ... If I don't get what I want then I'll take it in blood, a queasy thug."
(Any word on whether said rapper, "Armageddon aka Geddy", might actually be Zack Snyder?)
That the fight scene wardrobe budget appears to have been covered by a few Victoria's Secret vouchers doesn't bear mentioning. All that's missing is Mickey Rooney standing on a street corner in the middle of the action, with taped eyes, yelling "Girls, girls, girls, look pretty for you, sucky-punchy, eye-fucky you long time, turn on any man."
(Don't worry about the apparently barely-legal thrills, though, the film makes a point of letting us know that Babydoll is actually 20 and merely looks 14. That's much better! Everyone can enjoy that!)
The cast spend the entire film looking vaguely panicked, like Snyder rolled tape and then went off to get a sandwich; watching actors left without direction is like watching suddenly orphaned children try to create a functioning family unit. Jon Hamm sleepwalks through the film as the lobotomy practitioner, nicknamed "The High Roller" because, I dunno, he'll fuck you in the eyeball for lots of money?
Its male stars - particularly Isaac - play it sweaty-faced and blue-balled, as though perpetually on the brink of climax. And why wouldn't they? Sucker Punch is the worst kind of prick-tease, a lifeless shoot-em-up peep show; when his stars' energy levels drop, Pimp Zacky slaps them around a bit to liven them up.
The soundtrack is comprised of dunderheaded '90s-sounding covers of tenuously thematically relevant songs - Emiliana Torrini doing White Rabbit, Carla Azar/Alison Mosshart doing Tomorrow Never Knows, and so on. But why stop there? Why not just get The Vengaboys to cover They're Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa! and call it a day?
This is a joyless film - and, considering its designs on itself as an action-packed burlesque, curiously prudish. In one scene, Blondie empties a few million rounds of lead into a dragon (yes, really), she yells "You mother-", the next two syllables merely mouthed. Is it too much to ask for a supposedly subversive action opus to at least swear properly?
Oh, that's right, it is - because Sucker Punch is PG-13 (M in Australia), so that young people the world over can revel in its gee whiz spectacle of bloodless yet sexualised violence.
Look, this film manages to be ugly, stupid, offensive, depressing, sexist and boring in equal measures. By the time Gugino and Isaac's droopy cover of Love Is The Drug (is it, Snyder? Is it really?) fires up over the credits, you will wish you could have got a two-for-one deal on Babydoll's lobotomy.
Here's a different way to experience Sucker Punch: open a bunch of tabs; in one, go to YouTube, load up Leeroy Jenkins; load up Suicide Girls in another tab; then take a bunch of downers and flick furiously between the two tabs while you play the Godzilla and Spawn soundtracks.
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